Apple built an ‘electronic city’ online 21 years ago that still stands out as one of its most puzzling flops

Apple's eWorld let users roam through a virtual town square Screenshot/YouTube Back in 1994, the Internet was still a vast, uncharted territory.

So the notion of creating a safe, familiar-looking space for early cyber surfers must not have seemed too outlandish for the Apple executives who came up with the plan.

But the short-lived online service that Apple rolled out that year, dubbed eWorld, failed miserably and the digital buildings that Apple erected now stand as online ruins that offer intriguing memories of a long-lost era.

Apple created eWorld in the vein of other "walled garden" online services of the time such as AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Instead of using a browser to navigate the web, these services provided a special, curated online experience that provided users with hand-picked content, chatrooms and email. Apple even licensed technology from AOL to make eWorld.

But Apple put its own touch on eWorld, and built the equivalent of an graphical, electronic city with various buildings that users could virtually visit.

City of the future or ghost town?

As an article in Macworld explained, "Each building in the city represented a different topical focus for the service, containing articles, chat rooms, discussion boards, and file downloads centered around various theme. For example, clicking on the Business and Finance Plaza building opened up a new window that presented the user with articles from Inc. magazine, business-themed discussion boards, and stock quotes. Other buildings focused on games and entertainment, shopping, learning (with encyclopedia access), and Apple product support."

The eWorld welcome screen screenshot/YouTube The price of admission was $8.95 per month, which included two hours of evening or weekend use, with each additional hour costing $4.95. By today's standards, that seems oddly expensive, but in the days of dial-up online services this was a pretty common pricing model.

"Eworld appears to deserve its reputation as a kinder, gentler on-line community, one where women and children can feel safe on the virtual streets and where newcomers are almost always greeted pleasantly, not with the abuse and insults common on other services. The service has the cyberspace equivalent of constables on duty around the clock. Boors, bullies and sexual predators are bounced quickly. Users are not permitted to be completely anonymous."

Part of the problem was that Apple never put much marketing muscle behind eWorld, which was only available for Mac users and for users of the Newton handheld device (a promised Windows version never materialized).

Former Apple CEO Gil Amelio, who shut down eWorld. Youtube screenshot And it was released during a time when Apple was struggling financially. A year after eWorld's launch, Apple CEO Michael Spindler was out, replaced by Gil Amelio, who began to cut products that were underperforming or not core to the business.

Midnight execution

When Apple shut down eWorld at 12:01 am on March 31, 1996, it had roughly 150,000 users, compared to AOL's 5 million.

Of course the biggest challenge facing eWorld (and eventually AOL) was simply the fact that centralized online services were being overtaken by the open Web. As public websites began to proliferate and consumers discovered the Web browser, there was little interest in paying for centralized online services.

Users accessed eWorld with a dial-up modem screenshot/YouTube The end of eWorld came swiftly for its users, many of whose anguished last cries can still be found online. One user lamented on a special online forum for for eWorld refugees that "our little planet got destroyed."

"From the fateful day in June of 1994 when it opened, I logged on daily, signed up a zillion friends, obviously not enough…" the user said.

Another wrote more hyperbolically:

"It was as though my life support was switched off suddenly! No more can I enter that friendly place where I always felt welcomed and could have a good laugh with people I hardly knew. It was a cold and sudden death a falsh and then silence, as though an Atom Bomb had gone off and it was the end of civilization as we know it. [sic]"